NASCAR: Chase Elliott Makes History With Win at Atlanta Motor Speedway

By Brian Jones

Chase Elliott continues to solidify his NASCAR legacy at a young age. On Sunday, the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series Champion won the Quaker State 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. According to the Associated Press, Elliott, who is from Georgia, won at his home track for the first time in his career. His father, NASCAR legend Bill Elliott, also won at Atlanta Motor Speedway, and that makes them the only Georgia-born drivers to win a Cup race in Atlanta. Additionally, the Elliotts are the third father-son duo to win in Atlanta, joining Ned and Dale Jarrett and Dale Earnhardt and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

"Yeah, just been a whirlwind," Chase Elliott told reporters after the race on Sunday. "These are the moments you wish you could bottle up and kind of keep, and unfortunately it just doesn't work like that, moments that are really special and near and dear to your heart like winning at your home track, a place that I've spent a ton of time at as a kid racing on the quarter-mile down here in Bandoleros and legends and a lot of trips between here and north Georgia up and down the road."

Elliott, 26, has now won three races this season, making him the first driver to reach that mark. He currently is in first place in the Cup Series standings and is on track to win his second Cup Series title in three seasons. Before the Atlanta race, it was reported that Elliott was looking confident ahead of the race, and he was asked if being back home had something to do with that. 

"We hadn't had a chance to be in the car all weekend, so I really didn't know how we would stack up. But yeah, just excited to be close to home and excited for another opportunity here," Elliott explained. "It's always really cool. Up until today we had never really had a great run here. We had been really solid I think one time in 2017 and outside of that it's been pretty mediocre. I was just excited for another opportunity and felt like we were in a good place as a team and as a group to go out there and execute a good day and fired off and our car was really, really good. Yeah, things went our way and was able to sweep the weekend."

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